Well
when it gets down to -50 degrees and you are trying to heat a 1200
square foot house which only has two inches of insulation in the
walls, yes only two inches, see dad put 2x2's over the blocks to nail
paneling to so there was only two inches of room for the insulation.
The heat for the basement was an old oil stove which set in the
living room combination, dinning room and kitchen. I can remember
standing in front of the oil stove turning around from time to time
as one side of your body would get warm the other side would get
could so you would turn to warm the other side back up, it was pretty
cold in there most of the time.

And to
make matters worst it would get so cold outside that any condensation
inside the 225 gallon fuel oil barrel would freeze in the line going
into the house, So of corse it was my job to go outside and thaw it
out, well we would use one of those small butane torches which is all
fine and dandy but it would be so cold outside that the torch would
only work for about four or five minutes and then stop because it was
so cold the butane would not turn into a gas to burn, so you would
have to run back inside and warm the torch up under the hot water and
then run back outside and heat the line some more, Often it would
take three of four trips in and out to get it thawed out. The only
real bad thing about this was some times the water would freeze up
to, for some reason which I never did figure out why but my dad had
to run the water lines from the well which was the hand dug well in
the corner of the basement to the kitchen through the bathroom under
the tub on the floor next to the outside wall. This was the furthest
away from the heat and the coldest part of the house since it was on
the exposed outside side wall. The water was frozen more often than I
would ever like to remember, and because it would always freeze under
the bath tub it was the most difficult to thaw out.

In the
spring when the snow starts melting the water would run in through
the walls on one side across the floor and out the other side, dad
did not water proof the wall or put any drain pipes under the ground
along the wall so the water would just flow in one side and out the
other like a stream. There was always a big mess on the floor in the spring.